About AuckFast Studios
Built with focus. Tuned for depth.
Our Story
AuckFast Studios was founded by two long-time collaborators who believe that good design doesn’t shout—it speaks through systems, structure, and consequence. After years of creative work across academia, research, and experimental games, we returned to where our ideas first collided: games that push back.
Based between Auckland and Belfast, we are proudly small, defiantly focused, and committed to designing games that defy convention, demand attention, and provoke thought.
Our Mission
We build spaces where systems lead, choices resonate, and worlds are built to be solved.
Our games ask something of you—whether they’re open-ended or tightly constrained. Sometimes that means pressure chambers. Sometimes it means sandboxes with teeth.
In every case, the goal is the same: engaging systems that reward intention, invite experimentation, and reveal themselves through play.
Deliberate. Focused. Built to endure.
Our Team
Nigel McBride
Nigel turns structure into story. Before games, he studied the outer edges of musical meaning—where form meets perception and ontology breaks down. Now he brings that same focus to systems that speak: layered, deliberate, and built to say something. At AuckFast, he leads design from the inside out—shaping mechanics, themes, and the space between.
Ralph Versteegen
Ralph thinks in systems. Beyond his work on experiential experiences, he works on open-source software and on topics including computational science and mathematics, statistical learning, and analogical reasoning. He builds the scaffolding behind AuckFast’s worlds: logic that organises and adapts, underlying how the world holds together even when everything else falls apart.